By now all four instruments are complete – all bodies are closed, all scrolls have been carved and inserted, and Yonatan went through all of them once more, applying final touches with his most precise instruments where needed. Now comes another important and magical stage – varnishing!

The varnish plays an extremely important role in the final outcome of the stringed instrument, as it provides necessary protection for the wood over the many years the instrument will be playing. Of course the varnish also gives the violin special colors and adds that beautiful, shiny glow. As was the case with other crucial steps, varnishing is where the violin maker’s artisanship – knowledge, sure hand, sensitive eye, and patience … that illusive quality once again – really shine. And I mean literally SHINE.

For the Quartet Yonatan decided to use an oil varnish which of course he makes himself. In fact, looking at him making that varnish, and even hearing him talk about it, make me think of a combination between a science project – – and a type of witchcraft…. He uses materials produced by far-away trees, dyes extracted from snails and beetles, and boils turpentine or alcohol to incredibly high temperatures, making them bubble, fume and change their colors… you get my drift 🙂

Here, for example, is what his workbench looks like when he varnishes:

Anyway, as he explained it to me, oil varnishes are harder to control when applying on the instruments, but they have the advantage of being extremely beautiful if properly prepared and applied. As is true for much about hand-made instruments, and true for Yonatan’s Quartet, the varnish is still prepared much in the same way as it has been for the last 350 years – from natural rosins, turpentine and dyes. You know how some violins are yellowish, some reddish-brown, others are orangey or even almost cherry-red? Well, usually these are the dyes that make the difference, but it can also be the type of varnish used. Yonatan especially likes to use oil varnish as it allows him to varnish the instruments without using dyes at all (!) Varnishing without dyes may sound as impossible as painting without colors, but that’s not the case at all. What he does is use a combination of very dark rosins, and then he boils them for a very long time so that they become darker still. This way he uses but a few coats of varnish, and with the preparations the wood went through – tanning in the ultra violet light as well as a few other steps that we’ll keep as a professional secret – the instruments become yellowish, then golden, and finally a rich, deep, beautiful golden-brown. The really cool thing about the oil varnish is that at the end of the process the color it produces is at once rich and potent, while also being transparent to allow the play of the wood’s natural grain to clearly show:

As you can see from the pictures, Yonatan is now working on all four instruments simultaneously, varnishing one, and while the varnish is drying, varnishing the others. Making the varnish from scratch on his own and working with natural substances only, Yonatan can only control the final shade of the varnish to a certain extent. As with Nature more generally – much is out of his hands as the varnish takes a life of its own (especially since, if you Constant Reader remember, the sound boards of the four instruments are made from different pieces of spruce tree, although the rest of them is from that famous single maple trunk).

Is it a wonder that so many myths exist around varnishes in general and those of Stradivari more specifically? There are just so many variables here – the rosins, the temperature, the dyes, the quantities, the boiling time, the number of varnish coats (“mani“, meaning “hands” in Italian) used, etc. etc. etc., that it almost begs a myth of the perfect, secret, untold receipt that would make the perfect violin.

Unfortunately, we don’t believe in myths.

We have come a really long way and are in the final stretch of this amazingly ambitious – and inspiring – project (well, inspiring to me at least…). Here they are, all four “kids” as we have come to call them:

… but wait! Because we are also at the end of our rope as far as time goes. Mere weeks away from the deadline, Yonatan still has a lot of work to accomplish before the instruments are actually played. Stay with us and keep your fingers crossed 🙂

As promised last time, I am moving backwards in time from the “incastro” phase… to describe one of my favorite sections of the violin making process – the scroll, which in Italian is called “chiocciola“, (pronounced kyo-cho-la)meaning “snail”.

This is maybe the most obviously impractical part of the stringed instruments – it has nothing to do with the instrument’s strength, sound or playability. However, in addition to becoming one of the violin’s trademarks, the scroll is the place where the violin maker can really express her or himself. I’m sure that for most of you, like for me, most of those curly “snails” at the end of the instruments’ neck look about the same. Oh how wrong you are!

There are endless intricacies, variations, proportional differences and three-dimensional improvisations that go way beyond what we mortals are able to see – scrolls can be delicate or heavy, protruding or relatively flat, with a big or small “eye” (center), flowing downwards or upwards…. And these oh-so-subtle differences make the scrolls of each violin maker uniquely his. Not only that – the scrolls are one of the places that experts in violin evaluation look to decide whether this particular instrument is, in fact, a really valuable antique or whether it’s just the old, used instrument you happened to find in your grandparents’ attic, and wildly hoped that maybe, just maybe, you had stumbled across a long-lost Stradivari….

Since I am far from being one of those experts, I want to share with you what I find so magical about the scrolls: it’s Yonatan’s ability to three-dimensionally-imagine the perfect curve of the snail figure, and then to actually take a block of raw maple wood and turn it into that perfect, totally symmetrical, completely flawless, flowing form. Honestly – I still have trouble drawing a good two-dimensional circle… so seeing this process amazes me time and again. And thus, without further ado, I turn the stage over to pictures that will much better describe this amazing process:

Cutting the raw block of wood into the initial scroll form:

Further cutting it with a saw:

…and using a chisel to begin the three-dimensional work:

Then cutting again with a saw:

And beginning to slowly, patiently, sculpture the scroll, based on nothing but the eye’s perception and evaluation:

Then going round and round to deepen the curves and perfect them:

Then gently shaving and smoothing the edges:

Then working on the back side of the scroll:

Until finally there’s a perfect, flowing, almost sensuous, curvy chiocciola:

Remember how in my last post, two weeks ago, I wrote about the instruments tanning in the special UV closet? Well, by now they are all nice and tan (lucky them – no sticky sun lotion, no sand in their hair, no worries about skin cancer …. just an air-conditioned studio with their very-own UV closet!). All four are ready for the final phase of construction – inserting the necks into the bodies.

But wait – first the neck of each instrument needs to be created – that is sculptured from a new piece of maple wood, taken from the very same huge, old maple tree from which the sides and backs of the four instruments were created. That same maple tree that tickled my romantic glands and got me to start writing this blog to begin with…

Unfortunately, Yonatan was so immersed in preparing the neck of the cello, that he forgot to photograph the process for me, and by the time I realized this nearly-unforgivable sin, the neck of the cello was all but finished, the fingerboard already glued and ready to be inserted into the body. But – not to worry! As with all the other phases before, we have three more instruments to go, and three more times that this process will repeat itself. So what I’ll do, if you don’t mind (and even if you do, actually), is to describe the process backwards, starting from the insertion process, and next time going back to show how the neck and fingerboard were created. OK?

So first, here is a picture of the cello neck already prepared, with the necks of the three smaller instruments following it like little ducklings after their mother 🙂 You can see how the smaller necks were only cut in rough form the block of maple wood.

Apparently, inserting the neck into the body of the instrument –a process which as always has a much better name in Italian: “incastro” (with accent on the “ca“) – may seem like a technical step. However, it’s actually one of the more decisive factors that influence the sound of the complete instrument. Way back when Stradivari and other 17th century builders built their violins, they used to connect the neck with nails to the instrument, in a way that created a very wide, almost flat angle between the neck and the body. Gradually, as the violin progressed and modernized, this changed: the neck now connects to the body via a combination of physics and glue (more below) and the angle has become sharper. In fact, as Yonatan explained it to me, numerous variables must be considered by the violin maker when implementing the “incastro” so as to make sure that, when the strings are placed along the neck and on the bridge of the instrument, the right balance will be struck. What balance? You may ask, as I did. Well, it’s a balance between the quality of the sound and the volume of the sound; between a “muddy”, impotent sound, and a sound that’s too tightly wound, lacking harmony and warmth, and-so-on-and-so-forth…

Wow. So now that we got all our history straight, we can follow the process by which the neck was inserted into the body. As with other processes before (such as when the two parts of the soundboard were glued together) the neck must fit exactly, perfectly, into the body. So again, Yonatan tried to fit it, then shaved off another miniscule layer of wood, tried again, checked if the fit is really perfect, and shaved off yet another sliver – – until it was really, absolutely, uncompromisingly perfect. The neck’s part that must enter the body is trapezoid shaped, becoming narrower towards the end (left hand side in this picture), but also trapezoid shaped in its other dimension – wider towards the instrument and becoming narrower on the outside. Like so:

Get it??? It’s what carpenters call “dove-tail”, or more simply put – it looks like a wedge.

Apparently, this “double trapezoid” shape creates a very tight, perfect and strong fit, so that once it’s glued into place, the shape itself helps keep the neck in place.

Alas, that’s not all there is too it. Now enters the variable of the angle of the neck and fingerboard vis-à-vis the bridge. To make sure the angle is right, and also that the fingerboard is exactly straight and doesn’t tilt to one direction, Yonatan connected the bridge to the cello with rubber bands, just to keep it in place, and then positioned the neck in exactly the right angle, right tilt, right height, right distance…. You get my point: this is a very difficult phase that again relies heavily on the eye and intuition of the violin maker.

Finally, here they are: neck and bridge perfectly aligned with each other, the neck can finally be glued into place – incastro completed.

What will happen in the next couple of weeks is that as soon as one instrument is finished, Yonatan will begin to varnish it, while working in parallel to finish the incastro on the next instrument and so forth.

Hopefully next week I can show you the process by which the rough neck of the viola becomes the beautiful, curvy spiral (or chiocciola, meaning “snail”) that to me is one of the most fascinating, impressive and, yes, mysterious steps in the violin making process.

There are lots of things I didn’t know about violins before my husband became a violin maker. One of the most bizarre of them is that sometimes violins, violas and cellos get tanned before they are varnished. Yes – tanned as in a tanning salon.

But let me take a step back and give you an update on where we are with the Quartet: the bodies (or “casse” in Italian) of all four instruments have been closed, which is an important and exciting step. But as Yonatan explained to me yesterday over dinner, “there are phases in the violin-making process, in which it’s hard to see that real progress is made, but nonetheless a lot of work is required”.

“OK”, I thought to myself, “now he’s beginning to sound like a Zen-Buddhist…” out loud I looked at him and said “say WHAT?”.

“Well”, he said, “for example, after I close the body of an instrument, it would seem that work on it is finished. But actually there is still a lot of work to be done on the finishing touches that really create the perfectly-flowing, curvy lines of the hand-made instrument. I redo the “sguscia” (the indented line above the purfling all around the instrument’s contour), and shave very fine slivers off the instrument’s borders, rounding them further and making them more symmetrical and perfect still”. This, by the way, is not done with sandpaper – oh NO!! As I mentioned in an earlier post, sanding would scratch the surface of the instrument. So the entire, exact work of finishing the last details is done with a special, extremely sharp, gauge and with the scraper – one tenth of a millimeter (or less) at a time.

When the final touches on each instrument were completed, it went into the tanning closet. It’s like this – Yonatan had built a special, perfectly light-proof closet in his workshop, and placed extremely powerful ultra-violet lights in it. He hangs each instrument perfectly in mid-air, so that the lights can tan it evenly all around. It takes a number of days, but after tanning like this, the instruments’ wood acquires a beautiful golden color. This color will then serve as the background (or “ground“) for the varnishing process.

The instruments were placed in the tanning closet one after the other from mid-August onwards – first the cello, then the viola, then the first-violin, and finally, today, the second-violin. If you have ever had the misfortune to be in Israel during that time of year, you know it’s over 35 degrees Celsius most of the day, maybe dropping to a low of 30 at night (for all you Americans, that’s between 100 and 85 Fahrenheit…) with the sun beating on you like a hammer. So when I was tanning in the summer heat with the kids on the beach, the instruments had the ultra-violet light to tan them 🙂 Actually, this is exactly why the ultra-violet closet is used in the climate-controlled studio – the real sun around here is just too damn hot for the instruments. Boy, do I sympathize…

Here are a few pictures of the instruments tanning in Yonatan’s special closet:

Almost two-and-a-half months. That’s how long I didn’t write. That’s how long I haven’t posted a new entry in this Violin Maker’s Wife blog. Where should I start now? I guess some explaining is in order, but also – it feels like I’m starting to blog all over again. Is such a hiatus even allowed in the blog world?

Anyway – what happened was this – we moved to a new house, finally our very own, at the beginning of August. That’s all. It’s really as mundane and as boring as that… Only it didn’t feel mundane nor boring. It felt like one of the most stressful and hectic periods of our life. And my blog is what fell through the cracks. Actually that’s not even true. What fell through the cracks was Yonatan’s poor quartet, which was almost put on hold for almost three months, while Yonatan used all his considerable talent and experience to oversee the construction of the house, and if that’s not enough, he also decided to do much of the woodwork himself. So instead of using the saws, scrapers and varnishes in his workshop for violin making purposes, he used them to restore, renovate and build some major wood-elements of our new home. Here you can see two of the six (!!) doors that he renovated, but he also prepared the butcher block that makes up half of our kitchen, built our son Itamar a new bed etc. etc.

It all came out extremely beautiful, and obviously much more exact and refined than doors or beds were ever intended to be, but I guess now you understand why there was basically no time to advance the quartet, and thus basically nothing for me to write about.

So – now our life has finally calmed down, the new house feels like a home, kids are all back to school and kindergartens, and work on the quartet has resumed, as has my blog…. I hope some of you have missed it at least half as much as I missed writing it 🙂

So as a teaser for next week’s post, (which will deal with tanning, if you can believe it), here’s a picture from this week of the four instruments together. Looking at this picture I see that what I wrote was too pessimistic since Yonatan has actually managed to make quite a lot of progress during these past weeks: three of the instruments are closed and ready, while the last violin will be closed in the coming few days.

But now, we will begin the really hectic period: we have exactly one monthto finish the entire quartet, so that it will be ready in time. The four necks have still to be prepared and fitted, all instruments need to be varnished, and all four setups need to be fitted as well. It’s true that most of the work is behind us, but wow – doing all that in a single month will be one hell of a challenge!!

As a side remark, tomorrow is the Hebrew New Year. So keep your fingers crossed and continue to follow us as we embark on the final stage of what is now already a 10-month process of Yonatan turning blocks of wood into four beautifully-hand-made, playing instruments, while I turn this amazing process of creativity into…well… words!

By now it’s time to finalize a meaningful phase in the Quartet construction process – and finally close the “body” of each instrument. As you may remember, at the beginning of the process, Yonatan started with a wooden mold, on which he glued first the ribs and then the back of each instrument. Meanwhile, as I have told you, the sound boards of the cello and the viola have been constructed – including cutting the “f‘s” and reaching the exact “spessori” (thicknesses). But one step remains before the “body” of each instrument is closed. It’s an extremely important and very technical step – fitting in place and shaping the bass-bar (catena in Italian, read ka-tè-na).

What the hell is the bass-bar? Well, bear with me for a minute and imagine a violin…. you know how the strings all “sit” on a wooden bridge? So this bridge has two legs, each of which is supported from underneath (that is to say, from inside the violin – or from underground if you wish). The side of the bridge where the high strings are located is supported by the sound-post (anima), which I’ll get to at a later stage. The second leg of the bridge, where the bass strings are located, is supported – – you got it – – by the bass-bar.

This bar is actually a long, thin, curvy piece of wood that needs to be glued to the inside of the sound-board. Sounds simple? Well, it ain’t necessarily so… the bass bar needs to fit in a most exact manner to the arched underside of the sound board. It also needs to have exactly the right tension, be connected at exactly the right location, at exactly the right angle and about a dozen additional “exactlies” that are related to the properties of the wood, the model you picked, the violin-making school you follow and the-angle-of-sunlight-on-the-longest-day-of-the-year-in-the-equator… no, I guess everything but that last one.

So here is the bass bar of the cello being shaped:

Isn’t this last picture just great? This soon-to-be the interior of the instrument is by now so very smooth that it feels more like silk than wood…

When the bass-bar of the cello was glued into place and finally, patiently, perfectly fitted, Yonatan removed the wooden mold from inside the ribs and back (actually, he told me that he likes to keep the back of an instrument separate from the mold until the sound-board is finished so that he can flex both pieces of wood – one maple, one spruce, remember? – simultaneously, to feel if their thicknesses are perfect together. That someone can actually feel this by flexing pieces of wood is beyond my technologically-challenged imagination…)

Anyway – once the mold was removed and a few additional finishing touches were made (I’ve decided to spare you at least some of the technicalities…) the cello was ready to be closed, looking like this:

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the process of working on the sound-board, cutting the “f‘s”, fitting and gluing the “catena“, gluing the back into place, removing the mold and finally, finally closing the body was all completed first for the cello. This is important for Yonatan, as it allows him to concentrate on finishing the body of one instrument before moving on to the next.

Over the past two weeks Yonatan repeated the entire process with the viola – here is its bass-bar glued into place:

…and here is the entire Quartet, with the viola newly-glued (kinda’ like newlywed…) so still with the special clamps all around it, and the cello already closed and dry behind it.

Pretty cool how they are actually starting to look like instruments, right?

Now I have a question for you – what could be better than going to a concert and seeing Yonatan’s sister play one of his instruments on stage? I thought nothing could surpass that experience… until last night we went again to the same Rita concert where Galia plays a major part on the “Golden Viola” he had made especially for her. Apparently, one of the other musicians that has a major role – he plays a special Persian violin called Kamancheh – couldn’t come to that concert. Galia had to play his part too, and she did this on Yonatan’s violin.

Here’s a picture Galia took of both instruments just before the concert began…

As we summed up what was a truly breathtaking concert: Yonatan had two instruments and a sister on stage!!

No, I haven’t started using “French”… I just want to dedicate this post to the two “f‘s” – or sound-holes – of Yonatan’s Quartet, and I couldn’t resist the title 🙂

As I wrote last time, the “f‘s” were drawn on the exterior of each instrument’s sound board (or front) before the spessori work began. Once the majority of the wood has been carved out, Yonatan cuts them out (well, right now only those of the cello have been completed, and those of the viola will be in just a couple of days).

I asked Yonatan to explain the sound-holes to me and he said that, as in many components of the violin family, the sound-holes have both a functional aspect and an esthetic one. Functionally, they are located on both sides of the bridge, in the narrowest section of the sound-board, where the arch is the steepest. This is the area that needs to be flexible enough to vibrate, but at the same time strong enough to carry the tension of the strings. So cutting open the f-holes is what creates the necessary flexibility, allowing the sound-board to vibrate better.

Esthetically, apparently they were not always “f” shaped, but started out actually as two “c‘s”….. By now, though, it’s become tradition that they are “f” shaped, although there are numerous variations on the exact shape – some make them straight, others make them leaning to one side; some make the “heads” of the “f” round (Stradivari-style), and others make them elliptical (Guarneri-style); and so forth.

As was the case with a few prior phases of this work, the sound-holes are a place where the artisanship and personal touch of each violin maker come into play. Apparently, if you know the trade, you can recognize the “signature” of famous violin makers, just by the shape of their “f‘s” (!!) And also, as was the case a few times before, this is a phase that requires special artistic and technical skills (what the Italians call “manualità“, with the accent on the last “a”). Of course that’s why Yoantan likes it….

So in line with his choice to build the Quartet based on his own models, Yonatan designed the sound-holes in a way that would be the same throughout the Quartet, but would also work well with each of the different instruments. As he explained it to me, he likes making the sound holes “a little more oval-shaped than those of Stradivari, but a little less than those of Guarneri”. This is the kind of minute-details I guess I will never be able to see… but whatever makes him happy!

Actually, this is the same way with what is occupying most of our time these days – redoing the new house we recently bought. I look at various details (e.g. a door) and see such things are functionality, color, shape… and that’s about it. Yonatan looks at the same thing and also notices the way the door interfaces with the door-post, the texture of the paint and the interplay between the lines of the wood and those of the window in the next room… I guess in the end it may mean our home will have the same level of perfection as the Quartet 🙂

Unfortunately, at the moment the house looks like a real dump. No windows. No doors. No floors. And in part no roof. If I though four more months to finishing the Quartet is a tight schedule, how about 6 WEEKS to turn this construction site into a livable home?!?! Why six? Because in eight weeks the rental on the house we currently live in ends, and the new house had better be ready for us to move in with all our stuff, three kids, a dog and the fish aquarium.

But – as with the Quartet project, we remain optimistic! How about you? Want to place your bets?

So by now it’s Saturday morning and as in every first-Saturday-of-every-month we are on our way to the Open Shabbat at the Artisans’ Compound in Kibbutz Ein Carmel where Yonatan’s studio is located. It promises to be a beautiful summer day with a family picnic, outdoor fun with the kids and probably a couple of friends dropping by to visit, while Yonatan entertains the numerous visitors who come to the compound on these “open weekends”, explaining – once again – how he came to be a violin-maker, what wood a violin is made of, how much time it takes and how much it costs…

Ahh, if I had a dollar for every time someone walked through the door of Yonatan’s workshop and asked this question!! As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, this is usually the first question people ask about making a violin. The answer is actually rather interesting and I have found that even musicians who play stringed instruments are often unsure exactly which types of wood their instrument is made of.

Well, it’s like this: almost the entire instrument (and this is true for the whole Quartet), is made of a special maple wood, called “flamed” or “tiger” maple, that grows mostly in the Balkans. This is the single trunk that I told you about; the one that Yonatan hand-picked in order to build the entire quartet from; the one that got my romanticism-glands flowing and got me started on this blog. This maple trunk is used to construct the instruments’ backs, ribs and necks and has an especially beautiful grain that looks like flames, or waves, or tiger stripes (wait till we get to the part of the varnish, then you’ll see some really beautiful pictures of this!) Anyway, this is what most of the violin is made of.

The soundboard, or “belly”, of the instrument is a different issue entirely. It’s made of a radial cut (like a fat pizza-slice) from a special spruce tree which, as I briefly mentioned once before, is professionally-selected from the wild forests of the Alps, where the trees have to face harsh weather and compete for scarce sunshine and thus grow just a bit every year. As a result, the “rings” of their trunks are tight and close-together, making the wood lighter (as in less-heavy…) and more resistant. This spruce is then used to construct the soundboard as it has very special flexibility and vibration qualities – it’s basically what makes the violin sing.

Why am I explaining all of this? Well, just to say that last week Yonatan finished the spessori (“thicknesses”) phase of the four backs of his (our?) Quartet, and this week he has been working on carving out the wood from the first soundboard, that of the cello, which is a completely different matter.

First of all, on the external part of each of the four soundboards he drew the two “f” shapes that will make the sound holes on both sides of each instruments’ strings. Then he started working on the cello. According to his method of work – and like everything in the violin-making world, there are a number of traditional methods, each with its centuries’ old logic, ardent followers and no-less-ardent opponents – after the “f‘s” are drown, he craves out most of the wood – but not all. (Yonatan forgot to take a picture of this initial phase, so I’ll make sure he does for the next soundboard…)

When he got to a thickness of 4-5 millimeters (say, about two-tenths of an inch…), he cut-out the “f” holes with a special, brutally-sharp knife. Only then did he finish slowly and painstakingly carving out the last few millimeters of wood. Like in the spessori process he did for the back of the cello, this involved carving out a fraction, testing the thickness by measuring it and by gently flexing the wood…

… and repeating this sequence a few dozen times … until the right thicknesses are reached throughout the soundboard.

I stopped by the workshop the other day and saw that he was almost done with the soundboard of the cello (so credit for the last three pictures goes to me this time around:)…) Yonatan explained that he is currently at the point in which the thicknesses of the four backs have been completed and the “f‘s” were drown on all four soundboards. He said that at this point he must leave the “Quartet View” of things for a while and focus on each instrument individually. So now he basically finished carving out the “spessori” and cutting the “f‘s” of the cello and he will continue working on it until the cello’s front and back have been glued to the sides and the body of the instrument (called “cassa“, or ‘box’ in Italian), is closed.

I guess like in any good relationship, sometimes it’s important to distance yourself from the “family”, so that you can develop on your own and come back together in a much better, more complete shape… How is this “violin-analogy-popular-psychology” for you?!?

One last picture of the soundboards of all four instruments together, day before yesterday at the workshop:

I have been somewhat negligent of my blog (restructuring of our new home started last week, kids needed to be registered to new schools, etc. – all got in the way), and meanwhile Yonatan has been hard at work and, in addition to overseeing the restructuring process, is about half-way-through the thicknesses process. Lots to explain about this phase, so let’s get started:

As I mentioned last time, now that each of the fronts and backs have been carved from the outside into their rounded, curvy shape, Yonatan has been gauging out the inside of each, emptying it of wood and leaving an extremely exact thin layer of wood (doesn’t it sometimes seem like the wood of a violin was maybe bent into the shape it’s in? Well, now you know it’s actually carved out from a raw block of wood. Much more impressive I think!)

This ‘layer’ or ‘wall’ of wood, however, isn’t homogeneous throughout, changing between different segments of each ‘belly’ and each back.… complicated? I’ll try to explain –

Let’s take for example, the sounding board, (‘belly’ or “tavola” in Italian), of the cello. So Yonatan has a kind of “map” drawn that lists the various thicknesses throughout the belly’s plain. Usually, the belly is thicker – so more wood needs to remain – in its middle, and it’s thinner around the edges. The differences here – between so-called “thick” and “thin” areas – are tiny, not to say minute, just a few tenths of a millimeter (!!!) between say a “thick” section of 3.5mm and a “thin” section of 2.7mm, but this makes a hell of a difference.

For me there are two really interesting issues that come into play during Yonatan’s work on the Spessori (the Italian word for the “thicknesses” phase). The first is that here you can really understand the difference between a hand-made instrument, and a factory-made or serially-made one. Why? Because although each violin-making school has this type of “map” of thicknesses for the sounding board and back, Yonatan’s professionalism is to adapt this generic map to the specific characteristics of the piece of wood he is holding in his hand. Sometimes the wood is “softer” and more pliable, so he leaves just a bit more wood, making the sounding board thicker in the smallest degree. Other times, if he feels the wood of that specific instrument is rather “tough” or “hard”, he shaves off a tiny bit more wood, to compensate for that.

The second thing, which I guess is a recurring fascination of mine with the entire violin-making process, is how much PATIENCE this phase requires. At first, gouging out the wood is done with relatively rough gauges, but then the wood becomes really thin and Yonatan must use much more exact instruments – like the finger planes I mentioned before – to slowly and painstakingly reach the exact thickness he desires in each section of each front and each back…

And so he gauges out a tiny, thinnest layer, and then measures the thickness that remained with a special instrument that you can see in the picture here and then gently – very gently – flexes the wood to “feel it”…

Then he scratches away another tenth of a millimeter, and again measures the thickness of that specific section and tests the wood… and so forth –

You get the picture of how much PATIENCE this requires?? (an American artist-friend of mine once created this art piece once that she called “Pain in Patience”, in which she stuck hundreds of small needles in a stuffed surface to make the word ‘patience’ with the needles that made the letters of the word ‘pain’ sticking out further.) I am reminded of this because patience is one of the hardest things for me to master in this world and watching Yonatan’s seemingly ENDLESS PATIENCE during this phase always amazes me – and half makes me want to scream 🙂

Anyway – the Spessori for the backs (“fondi”) of the cello and the two violins have been completed, and so the back of the viola remains to be finished, as well as the sounding boards (“tavole“) of all four instruments. … but time waits for no one, and we have only less than five months to go till the deadline!

A couple of people have told me they like the pictures in this blog (so credit to Yonatan who finds innovative new ways of taking pictures even while he works…). Since I can only insert a couple here, check out the great photos we have uploaded to the Quartet Slideshow!!

You know the 80:20 rule? The one that says that 80% of any given work take about 20% of your time, and the remaining 20% of the work take up 80% of your time? I personally find that this rule applies to almost anything you need to accomplish in life, and apparently it is also true for the violin making process as a whole and each step within it specifically.

Last time I wrote about the Bombatura process – the arching process that defines the instruments’ external shape, volume and body – the heavy-duty work was basically done with, and the “only thing” that remained was to fine-tune the external shapes. Well, in addition to numerous other projects Yonatan has undertaken over the past three weeks or so, he has been working on this last 20% of the Bombatura process. As I wrote, special planes called “thumb planes” were used to carve the external arch of each instrument’s front and back. Below you can see two such planes during work on the viola. The trucioli – wood curls – they produce are very fine indeed.

Then, when all four instruments have reach the phase that their external arching has basically been shaped and carved, Yonatan uses a special scraper (rasiera in Italian) to fine-tune the shape even further, and actually to smoothen the surfaces as you would with a sandpaper. So why not sandpaper? you may ask. Well, there is apparently a WORLD of difference: while sandpaper sands wood by scratching its surface (thereby leaving…well… scratches on it), the scraper really cuts the wood’s surface, like the planes and gauges do, but in a very exact and minimal way, leaving the surface smooth and scratch-free.

When Yonatan first set up his workshop in our apartment in Cremona, this was one of the phases that blew me away – seeing his never-ending patience as he scrapes one thin layer of wood, and then another … and another still…. until finally the surface of each instrument becomes smooth and begins to glow so that the distinctive shapes and colors of the wood begin to really show.

Once this phase ended and all four instruments’ fronts and backs were smooth and shining, Yonatan put them away for a day or so. The next morning, he came into his workshop, lined all of them up (four instruments, times two pieces, so eight pieces all in all) and took “a fresh look” at them. He went once again over each of them, to check if the shape of the body is what he wanted to achieve, and made final corrections and modifications. Then, once again, he placed all of them next to one another and checked that the “line” he created has a common denominator for the entire Quartet.

And finally, as he did at the end of the “purfling” process, he attached each instrument’s front and back to the appropriate wooden mold, to make sure the pieces don’t bend out of shape from humidity, temperature changes etc. He uses special clamps for this purpose, that have rubber endings and do not harm the delicate wood, and when these claps are attached all around the instrument – smaller clamps around the smaller instruments, and larger ones around the mold of the cello – the instruments have a very particular look, as if there are snails or multiple eyes all around them… or maybe they actually look like the famous Barbapapa family!

Post number 13 on Friday the 13th… no wonder this post was so difficult to write:) Have a great weekend and look at these beautiful new pictures in the Quartet Slide show!!